Many instructors continue to face classes that seem like the dawn of the dead, but most welcome opportunities to engage students more. Over the years, various methods and technologies have aimed to break through this barrier of indifference. One twist is the “clicker,” an electronic personal response system that allows students to answer questions posed by the instructor during class. Depending on the format, students click their answers either directly or after discussing alternatives with nearby students. The clicker, about the size of a TV remote, sends a signal to the instructor's receiver, which compiles answers and projects the results on a screen.

Advocates believe that clickers boost class participation, offering instructors and students immediate feedback. Instructors can adjust their presentations in real time to help remedy deficiencies. Students must keep up with the material to answer the questions. Just the process of trying to come up with answers aids learning. Many students view clickers as a game (the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire uses the same approach). And clickers allow students to answer without having to speak up in class—a plus for shy students. Clickers can also be used to monitor class attendance and help get students to class on time (some instructors pose clicker questions at the beginning of class to discourage tardiness).

In a University of Wisconsin survey of 2,700 clicker-using students (Kaleta and Joosten, 2007), most agreed that clickers increased engagement, offered instant feedback, and helped them learn. Nearly all 27 instructors surveyed agreed that clickers increased engagement, helped them assess student knowledge, increased class discussion, and helped students learn. Some instructors said the class came alive as never before.

Is there a downside? Like any new technology, clickers have startup costs. In addition to the dollar cost of clickers ($25 to $40 each) and a receiver ($100 to $200), growing comfortable with the system can take weeks. Even when everyone’s up to speed, clickers claim class time, especially while answers are getting aggregated and the results displayed. As one student noted, "It takes time—all the while, the class gets really loud, and I have to enjoy someone's story about a friend's picture on MySpace instead of learning." And complications arise when clickers are lost, stolen, not working, or don’t match students; such problems often tie up an instructor’s time.

How common is clicker use among economists? I surveyed a random sample of 60 principles of economics courses with syllabi posted on the web (ruling out courses taught exclusively online). I found no evidence that clickers were used anywhere in this sample. I then searched specifically for clickers in economics syllabi and found about a dozen courses that use them. In these instances, clicker questions were spaced throughout the presentation—about five or six questions per class. Clicker activity counted as 10% to 20% of the course grade—weighty enough to get the student’s attention.

In at least one course, students were penalized for poor attendance (as captured by clicker use) but not for wrong answers per se. With clickers figuring into the course grade, cheating can become an issue. Ted Bergstrom of UCSB warns students on his syllabus that he will regularly ask a few students whose clickers were used that day to introduce themselves after class and show him an ID: “If you are caught using more than one clicker or if your clicker registers [that day] and you are not in class, you will fail the course. It is that simple.” Although instructors and students are generally positive about clickers, evidence of student learning is hard to find. An analysis of 11 parallel courses taught at the University of Wisconsin found a small but statistically significant impact of clicker use on course grades (Kaleta and Joosten, 2007). In clicker classes taught during the fall of 2005, 85% of students earned a C or better versus 83% of students in the non-clicker classes taught during the fall of 2004 (apparently, there were no pretests or other controls, so these results are weak).

In another study, Margie Martyn (2007) taught four computer information systems classes in the fall of 2006. She used clickers in two classes (n=45) and a show of hands in two classes (n=47). A pretest found no significant difference between the two groups. The same PowerPoint® presentations, including the same questions, were used in all four classes. Martyn found no significant difference on the final exam score between the two groups. She suggests that her own inexperience with clickers could have contributed to the lack of improvement. Note that a show-of-hands approach becomes less practical as class size increases. I would have expected classes using clickers to do better, if only because the instructors, who tend to be positive about the experience, are also the ones who compose and grade the exams. Clickers have been around for nearly a decade, but they have yet to catch on (at one state university for which I have recent figures, they were used by only 2% of the faculty).

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL?

Three years ago The Teaching Economist discussed the publishing hit Freakonomics by Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The book, which shows the power of some simple economic propositions, has now been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than three years. It has yet to appear in paperback (that’s like a movie playing in theaters for more than a year before migrating to cable or DVD). This wild success has launched other economics books aimed at a general audience. New entries that distill the power of economic reasoning include Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist (Dutton, 2007) by Tyler Cowens of George Mason University and The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (Random House, 2008) by Tim Harford, a Financial Times columnist.

But Freakonomics has also given rise to another strain of books that, rather than sharpen the economic toolkit, challenge the assumptions of economic reasoning. One getting a lot of attention is Predictably Irrational (Harper, 2008) by Dan Ariely of MIT. The book, which debuted number five on the NYT best-seller list, tries to show through dozens of experiments that people are irrational, but in predictable ways. Ariely argues that because economic theories assume rationality, they are unrealistic: “Wouldn’t economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?” (p. 239).

As in Freakonomics, the subject matter in Predictably Irrational is all over the map. Much of it is not new or surprising (e.g., people procrastinate and cheat), but Ariely’s experiments are always interesting. I’ll offer a quick chapter-by-chapter summary, comment on what he views as his major challenge to economics, then, in the next two sections, I’ll discuss findings of classroom relevance.

Here are one-sentence summaries of each of the 13 chapters: (1) As consumers, we don’t know what we want or are willing to pay until we see things in context (e.g., the highest priced item on the menu increases a restaurant’s revenue even if nobody buys it—that high price offers context for the prices below it, making them appear more reasonable). (2) What consumers are willing to pay can be manipulated by suppliers (more on this below). (3) People get irrationally excited about a zero price (e.g., they are willing to wait in long lines for something “free”). (4) Social exchange and market exchange each has its own dynamic, but problems arise if the two markets intersect (e.g., never leave the price tag on a gift). (5) Young men are poor predictors of how they will behave when sexually aroused. (6) People procrastinate (see a classroom application below). (7) People overvalue what they already own (but, I might ask, what about buyer’s remorse?). (8) People pay too much to keep their options open. (9) Expectations play an important role in shaping how much we will value something. (10) The placebo effect is powerful and works even through prices (e.g., aspirin believed to be pricier works better). (11) If given the opportunity, most people cheat a little, but cheating does not increase much even if it becomes easier, and cheating is sharply reduced when a moral dimension is introduced (again, see a classroom application below). (12) People are more honest when cash is involved. And (13) restaurant patrons show their independence by ordering something different from what others at the table ordered even if that item is not what they prefer most.

Many of his experiments reflect Ariely’s psychology and marketing interests (he has Ph.D.s in each field but not in economics). The finding most challenging to economists arises in Chapter 2, where Ariely questions the validity of supply and demand curves: “[W]hat consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don’t in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences” (p. 45). Consumers, he argues, are highly suggestible when it comes to price, especially where they have little experience with the product. For example, he says that Starbucks could charge $4 for a cup of coffee because the company positioned the product as a completely new experience. Maybe so, but sooner or later doesn’t market competition put downward pressure on the price? For example, Starbucks is now closing stores, while lower priced rival Dunkin’ Donuts is expanding. And VCR’s originally sold for about $30,000; you can find them now for as little as $30. Besides, economists never said they had much to contribute when it comes to the origin of tastes and preferences. Ariely’s argument that tastes come from experiencing the goods in context doesn’t pose the threat to economics that he claims.

Procrastination

Ariely’s chapter on procrastination discusses an experiment that should be of interest to instructors. Certainly it’s no surprise that we all procrastinate to some extent; we also see the results of student procrastination every term. To test some issues of procrastination, Ariely assigned three papers that counted for most of the grade in the course. He wanted to uncover the effects of different deadlines on student performance, so he varied the deadline structure across each of his three consumer behavior classes.

In the first class, he had each student set his or her own deadlines. By the end of the first week, each student had to specify a deadline for each of the papers. Any date before the end of the term was acceptable. Once deadlines were set, late papers would be penalized. Although the most flexible option was to pick the final day for all papers, most students recognized their tendency to procrastinate and chose to bind themselves with deadlines spaced throughout the term. Ariely argues that it’s irrational to procrastinate, but students chose deadlines to offset their irrationality. What’s irrational about that?

In a second class of the same course, there were no deadlines at all. Students had to submit papers by the end of the last class period. In a third class, Ariely dictated deadlines spaced throughout the term. Here’s the question: which class did the best and which the worst? The group with deadlines set by Ariely did the best. Penalizing procrastination was the best cure for it. In the class where students set their own deadlines, those who spaced them out did as well as those with the instructor-imposed deadlines. On the other end, Ariely found that papers submitted by those with no intermediate deadlines or poorly spaced deadlines were rushed and poorly written (pp. 111-117).

Cheating

Ariely and colleagues conducted an experiment that was set up to determine whether and how much a group of participants would cheat on a math test (a test independent of any course). Test takers were paid for correct answers, so they had some incentive to cheat. A control group was tested under conditions that prevented cheating. Two other groups were given the same test under conditions that made cheating by a particular participant virtually undetectable (without getting into the mechanics of the experiment, the cheating involved how participants reported the number of correct answers and collected their winnings). Before they took the test, participants in one group were asked to write down the titles of up to ten books they read in high school. Participants in the other group were asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could recall. The researchers were curious whether introducing a moral dimension like the Ten Commandments would reduce cheating.

The group asked to recall book titles appeared to cheat, as they scored on average 33% higher than the control group. The Ten-Commandment group apparently did not cheat at all, as their test average was about the same as for the control group. The Ten Commandment exercise appeared to evoke honesty. What’s more, students who could remember only one or two Commandments were as honest as those who remembered all ten. Ariely concludes that “it was not the Commandments themselves that encourage honesty, but the mere contemplation of a moral benchmark of some kind” (pp. 208-209). (I might add, what’s irrational about that?) In another experiment, test takers were asked to sign a statement to the effect that “I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system.” This group didn’t cheat either (even though MIT has no formal honor system).

THE GRAPEVINE

Another book that underscores bad choices is Nudge (Yale University Press, 2008) by Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago and Cass R. Sunstein of Harvard Law School. Nudge hits some of the same notes as Predictably Irrational. “Drawing on some well-established findings in social science, we show that in many cases individuals make pretty bad decisions—decisions they would not have made if they had paid full attention and possessed complete information, unlimited cognitive abilities, and complete self-control”(p. 5). Thaler and Sunstein propose what they call libertarian paternalism—measures to “nudge” us towards choices that will make our lives better. The idea is not to block bad choices such as smoking or overeating, but to intervene in a way that is “relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive.” Keep in mind that many smokers, drinkers, overeaters, and couch potatoes are already willing to pay third parties to help them make better choices. One nudge to help people improve their performance is feedback. For example, a well-designed college course should offer lots of feedback, telling students when they are doing well and when they are not.

In keeping with an irrationality theme, I’ll also mention Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press, 2007). Caplan, from George Mason University, argues that voters systematically favor irrational policies. He identifies four “biases” that cause voters to support measures that make them worse off. First, people don’t realize that the pursuit of profit usually promotes the general good: they have an anti-market bias. Second, they underestimate the benefits of interacting with foreigners: they have an anti-foreign bias. Third, they believe that prosperity arises from employment rather than from production: they have a make-work bias. And fourth, they tend to think economic conditions are worse than they actually are: they have a pessimistic bias. Politicians often reinforce these biases. Caplan believes economists could be more enlightening: “When economists choose between communicating (a) nothing, or (b) simplified but roughly accurate conclusions, they strangely seem to prefer (a). When you have an entire semester with a group of students, they forget all but the main points. If you fail to hammer a few fundamental principles into your students, odds are they will take away nothing at all. Yet in the dozens of economics courses I have taken, the professors rarely took their constraint seriously. Many preferred to dwell on the details of national income accounting, or mathematical subtleties, or the latest academic fad” (pp. 199-200).

Odds and Ends

• The Experimental Economics Center at Georgia State University supports EconPort, an online library that specializes in economic experiments. The site, http://www.econport.org/econport/request?page=web_home, offers teaching modules, a game-theory handbook, a glossary of economics terms, and software for running experiments.
• According to a recent survey, the share of students applying to six or more colleges increased from 18% in 1997 to 28% in 2007. The share applying to just one college dropped from 25% to 17%. Minorities applied to more colleges: 52% of Asian Americans applied to six or more colleges (for a 6.1 average), as did 36% of Latino students (5.0 average) and 32% of African American students (4.9 average). Only 23% of white students applied to six or more colleges (for a 4.1 average). For details, go to http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/PDFs/pubs/briefs/brief-20080512-Applications.pdf.
• According to a survey of 56,818 students entering 262 four-year colleges, 58% of those with an A average in high school completed college in four years and 78% completed in six years. Those with a C average in high school (a much smaller group) had a four-year completion rate of only 8% and a six-year rate of 20%. Among students with a combined SAT score of at least 1300, the four- and six-year completion rate was 62% and 77%. Among those scoring less than 800, it was 18% and 40%. Students with an A average and combined SAT of 1300 finished in four years at a 69% rate and in six years at an 83% rate. For those with a C average and SAT of less than 800 it was 8% and 20%. The study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute is based on students entering college in the fall of 1994 and whose degree completion status was determined in the fall of 2000.
• For a great example of video as a learning tool, see this three-dimensional explanation of Möbius transformations by two University of Minnesota math professors on YouTube at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY.
• Alan Enthoven, now emeritus at Stanford, used to say that policymakers at the highest levels could learn as undergraduates all the economics they needed to know for their policy jobs. But he believed that graduate training was necessary to convince them that what they learned as undergraduates was true and relevant.
• The University of Chicago Law School blocks Internet access from classrooms. According to the dean, "One student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes, and within 20 minutes an entire row is shoe shopping."
• “Has any economist ever attracted the kinds of cheering crowds that Barack Obama has—or even the crowds attracted by Hillary Clinton or John McCain? If you want cheering crowds, don't bother to study economics. It will only hold you back. Tell people what they want to hear—and they don't want to hear about supply and demand.” –Thomas Sowell
• “I put a dollar in one of those change machines. Nothing changed.” –George Carlin

For helpful comments on a draft of this issue, I thank William Alpert, Sarah Greber, Dennis Heffley, Charles Martie, Stephen Miller, Stephen Sacks, Dave Shaut, and Susan Smart.

If you have developed any attention-getting examples, ways to "sensationalize" economic ideas, useful resources on the Internet, or more generally, ways to teach just for the fun of it, please share these with colleagues in “The Grapevine” by sending them to:

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The Teaching Economist
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